iDVD is my nemisis

I have yet to be able to burn a full dvd in iDVD. Everytime i try it either hangs on the Multiplexing and burning phase forever (iDVD 3) Or Unexpectedly quits toward the end of the Asset Encoding phase.(iDVD 4) This is extremely frustrating. And has happened on numerous projects that i need to get done. iDvd seems to work fine on all of my friends computers but mine is another animal. i have a 17" inch G4 iMac with 512 of RAM. Would more RAM help this? Possibly moving the source files to another hard drive? I have tried both encoding types (60 and 90 minute) but get the same results either way.

My guess is that is may be a RAM issue. I had 512 when I first bought my PB 17" 1.33 GHz. For work purposes I increased the RAM - to 2 GB and never had a problem with any iLife program again. The specs on the Apple website say that iDVD requires 256 MB of RAM. OS X alone needs at least that much to run smoothly. This means with 512 of RAM you're really taxing your system. I don't think you'd need to go as extreme as 2 GB - boost your machine up to 1 GB or 1.5 GB and you should be fine.You will really notice an overall imrovement in performance as well.

I have yet to be able to burn a full dvd in iDVD. Everytime i try it either hangs on the Multiplexing and burning phase forever (iDVD 3) Or Unexpectedly quits toward the end of the Asset Encoding phase.(iDVD 4) This is extremely frustrating. And has happened on numerous projects that i need to get done. iDvd seems to work fine on all of my friends computers but mine is another animal. i have a 17" inch G4 iMac with 512 of RAM. Would more RAM help this? Possibly moving the source files to another hard drive? I have tried both encoding types (60 and 90 minute) but get the same results either way.

Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

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I had similar problems with iDVD 3, and was able to solve it by disabling the Energy Saving features. In other words, set your hard drive to not spin down, set the computer and display to never go to sleep, and even disable the screensaver. This was on a 1 GHz PowerMac G4, with either 768 meg or 1.25 Gig of ram (I don't remember when I added the extra 512 Meg). Also, what kind of media are you trying to use? That might be part of the problem as well. I haven't had any problems with iDVD 4, but that's running on a Dual 2GHz G5 with 1.5 Gig of ram. Oh I just remembered another thing; in iDVD 3 let the project finish encoding before you click the burn button. It will encode in the background; you can click on the status tab to check on the progress. In iDVD 4 you only get this option if you choose Better Performance (I think) and your movie is under 1 hour. Hope this helps.

I thought it was a media issue at first but have tired several brands. Most recently Sony, it is a Sony Drive afterall, with TDK i would get the Media Error message alot.. Haven't considered ram but it's always an option.

I have a very similar problem where iDVD just quits in the middle of multiplexing (iDVD 4). just flat out crashes. very unreassuring. I had to find a copy of dvd studio pro just to get the thing burned for a deadline. Now that i've used it i wanna buy the production suite just for dvdstudiopro lol... educational discount is $500 for the pro. suite. Wish i had the money because dvd studio pro rocks ... i loved my experience with it.

Define "forever." I had a 17" G4 iMac (800) and it took many, many hours to encode and burn a one-hour DVD. Also, in the middle of encoding, Activity Monitor would show iDVD as "hung" but it really wasn't. I made many coasters by forcing it to quit when it appeared to be hung, but learned that if I just let it run its course, it'll eventually spit out a DVD. How long are you waiting before you kill the app and have you successfully made DVDs of this length before?

I have yet to be able to burn a full dvd in iDVD. Everytime i try it either hangs on the Multiplexing and burning phase forever (iDVD 3) Or Unexpectedly quits toward the end of the Asset Encoding phase.(iDVD 4) This is extremely frustrating. {...}
Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

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Macpoops said:

I thought it was a media issue at first but have tired several brands. Most recently Sony, it is a Sony Drive afterall, with TDK i would get the Media Error message alot.. Haven't considered ram but it's always an option.

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veedubdrew said:

Define "forever." I had a 17" G4 iMac (800) and it took many, many hours to encode and burn a one-hour DVD. Also, in the middle of encoding, Activity Monitor would show iDVD as "hung" but it really wasn't.{...}

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Everyone has or had issues like this, including me. I start all my encoding at about 9pm and most often the dvd isn't ready until between 6am to 9am the next morning. Make sure to turn off energy saving stuff so your machine doesn't try to go to sleep in the middle of it's work.

The bottom line is, iDVD seems to be very sensative to just about everything (clips/assets, building the theme/chapters, physical media, etc).

Here's a couple of threads that might help:
This one (admittedly mine put together from a bunch of posts by others and my own research) describes how to look for certain glitches in the clips which cause iDVD to drive off into the woods.http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=96324

This is the best one! It's the Unofficial iDVD FAQ and has more stuff than you can imagine all around iDVD (Installation, Quality & Performance, Usage, Errors, etc). A huge read but well worth it.http://www.kentidwell.com/idvd4/

I had no problems whatsoever with iDVD 3 on my 12" PB but iDVD 4 has been another matter. At first, I couldn't appear to burn any DVDs at all - they would all hang on the Stage 4: Multiplexing and Burning. Eventually I had to force quit iDVD and cancel it but the disc remained blanc luckily.

Now, I've found that normal video DVDs work fine with iDVD 4. However, I can't get any discs with slideshows in them (with photos up to the 99 photo limit) to work. Even a very simple one with just 6 slideshows and nothing else would hang indefinitely on stage 4 (it must have gone wrong after 15 hours of stage 4!).

Deleting the iDVD preference file never solved anything for me but that's another thing to try if you're having problems. A new one with the default settings will be created whenever you next start up iDVD.

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